Maybe the game has to be broken / unbalanced in order to be true to the source? Making the game much easier might carry a message of its own that’s worth expressing.

Does God act like a prayer-answering vending machine in our real-world faith? Do we understand why he answers sometimes and not others? (There are many varying answers to those super-loaded questions within Christianity – some easy to model, some not.)

And, I guess I’ll toss this out there although this is more theology than game design: was the God of the Old Testament really any different than the “Christian” God after Christ? I kind of think that our religious culture is too quick to create an ‘Old Covenant’ divide and let that be the scapegoat for anything that’s hard to wrap our head around in the OT. Perhaps by looking harder for the God of grace and love in the OT, a different understanding of how grace interacted with sacrifices will come to light. (Then you can model it in a nethack clone, and confuse everyone!)

I’m a Christian. A fanatic one, in fact. I lead two Bible studies. I am a weekly church goer. I participate in small group. I regularly witness to unbelievers.

And I have also ascended every single class, race and gender in nethack.

It’s a fun game. I agree that it is in no way a model for spiritual reality, It’s worth playing for the technical knowledge gained from the source code, and for the cultivated problem solving skills. It’s excellent practice for debugging programs .. I’ve done both.

Be that as it may, I’ve tried to write a “Christian” variant using the open source … but that has failed. It will have to be a pre-NT version of the game, back in the time of Abraham and animal sccrifice.

Why? Quite bluntly, because I’ve found it impossible to model a God of grace for game purposes. See, if the game God forgives every evil deeds or answers every prayer as asked, he becomes an ATM machine and it breaks the game balance.

In order for a “god” to participate in this game, that interaction has to be based on specific rules. What he will and will not do. There has to be rewards for good behavior, and punishments for bad behavior. Further, good things can’t simply be given… they have to be earned. Otherwise a player could simply stand at an altar and keep praying until he’d had Grayswandir and silver dragon scale mail showered on him. Then get out of any jam by simply praying.

In order for the game to be at all interesting, there has to be the possibility of the character losing. Which means the game god has to deliberately turn a deaf ear to the character’s prayers.

As I said, this plays will with an old covenent-style system based on rules. The Christian God, with a covenant of Grace, seems impossible to model without at least human-level intelligence. Quite beyond a simple game such as Nethack. Perhaps this is why so many false religions have a system built on rules … rules are something less than humans. But the real God, the God of grace, is greater than humans. Perhaps this is evidence our God is the real God?

Although if anyone has any suggestions for modeling appropriately, I’m willing to listen.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I’m not *really* wrankled in the sense that I’m offended in any personal way. I find it hard to be offended by video games, or really…anything. I’m most offended by the types of people which might get offended by this type of project/game: narrow-minded and ignorant activist types.

But this isn’t a discussion about them, per se. More about how they may view a game with these elements, specifically in the ways I was mentioning above.

Anyway, I just wanted to make that for the record. I don’t want to turn this into a debate (polite word for argument) over beliefs and morality. There’s no point to that, to me. Though the discussion revolves around how others may view this very topic within the context of a video game which simulates a deity, particularly God Himself. Yeah…

As I have tried to say: my stance here, really, isn’t to moralize such work. I think as much as we have freedom to read and believe, or not, there is freedom to create and express. If there’s at least one thing God has never forced or undermined, it is our free will.

What I am concerned over, very specifically, is a real-world type game that supposes to simulate real-world deity. I just don’t see that causing anything more than lost time and revenue, perhaps other collateral damage unforeseen. Purely marketing-vision, really.

Although, the more I think about it, the more I think that I’d probably err deliberately on the side of using a highly random model, maybe mixed with scripted events if the game’s relation to plot required it. Honestly, most of Christianity’s attempts to try to figure out what God is going to choose to do at any given moment are so filled with exceptions, flaws, or heresies that maybe the best thing to do is get back to basics and just “draw lots”.

I have no problem with anyone inserting religion or God or anything into a game. The only problem I have is not then making sure that it is labelled “Fictional” or “Merely A Simulation.” …. They may be up in arms about how it will subvert (as you say) people’s own freedoms of how they perceive deity

If I’m reading this correctly, I don’t buy it at all. How does creating (or playing) a game with an interactive God-character subvert someone’s freedom to think what they want? I don’t think expressions of religious belief need disclaimers for those who may not agree with them, no matter what medium is used.

Coming at this from a Christian perspective, depending on one’s theological position, creating a simulated God could be akin to idol creation and a violation of Ex.20:4. Is creating a simulated God necessarily idol creation?

That seems like a weird way to define “idol”, even if you take a pretty hardline approach. It’s not a graven image; it’s not created with the intent to worship it. I suppose you’re creating something for a fictional avatar/character to worship under the control of a user, but that seems pretty distinct from creating something for the user themselves to worship.

I think the only way to get to idolatry from there is to have a very different understanding of the player / game relationship than I would agree with. Some kind of ultra-immersiveness approach that completely disbelieves in the game’s “magic circle” such that when you choose to do an action in the game’s story world, it’s morally indistinguishable from doing the same thing in the real world. But that seems even more extreme than anything I’ve ever heard argued – not even the harshest anti-game-violence advocate accuses those who kill fictional characters in a game of being guilty of murder.

How much different would this kind of scenario be than an author, whose novel features characters who see the work of God in their lives and explicitly acknowledge His activity and character? In this respect, the portrayal of God in a novel is certainly biased to whoever is doing the writing. Chris would have to be wrankled about this kind of thing as well. I feel the same kind of wrankling that Chris feels, but if I work across other media, they too would seem to be simulating a God biased to whoever might be doing the writing/filming/broadcasting.

On a slighlty different tack, the so-called open school of theology might be more amenable to the simulation of God project as they have tried to bridge postmodern theory and more conventional kinds of theology. In my limited understanding of their position, they argue that God’s character is fluid, dynamic and open to change. However, this position has, as one might expect, come under intense criticism from traditional theologians.

Forgive these ramblings. This is a fascinating discussion.